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"Attacks on legitimate Web domains, including some belonging to the United Nations that began earlier this week, have expanded dramatically, security researchers said Friday, with hundreds of thousands of pages hacked by Friday.

One antivirus vendor said the sites might have been compromised through a "security issue" in Microsoft's Web server software that has been reported to Microsoft's engineers.

On Wednesday, several security companies, including California-based Websense, said large numbers of legitimate sites, including URLs for the U.N., had been hacked and were serving up malware. These latest site compromises were only the most recent SQL injection attacks, however; similar attacks have been launched since the first of the year, and were last detected in large numbers in March.

Earlier in the week, Dan Hubbard, Websense's vice president of security research, estimated the number of hacked sites in the low six figures. By today, that number had soared as firms such as Panda Security pegged the number at 282,000, and F-Secure said its infected-page count was above half a million.

"It's not like this is a brand-new problem," he said, referring to legitimate site compromises. "But Microsoft has already issued a security advisory that said they are investigating public reports of problems with IIS. This seems to be related to that advisory."

That advisory was published April 17, and warned users of a bug in most versions of Windows that could be exploited through custom Web applications running in IIS. It could also be exploited via SQL Server, Microsoft said.

On Friday, Microsoft said it did not know whether the ongoing site attacks were linked to the bug described in the April 17 advisory. "We have not yet determined whether or not these reports are related to Microsoft Security Advisory 951306 released last week," a company spokesman said in an e-mail.

Microsoft also contested Panda's claim that it had reported a problem. "Microsoft is currently aware of and is reviewing reports regarding public claims of attacks on IIS Web servers," said Bill Sisk, a communications manager who works in the Microsoft Security Response Center. "While we have not been contacted directly regarding these reports, we will continue to monitor all reports either publically shared or responsibly disclosed and investigate once sufficient details are provided."

Although it may not be clear how attackers are compromising such large numbers of Web sites, what happens after a site is infected is well-understood, researchers have said. When a visitor reaches one of the hacked sites, malicious JavaScript loads an IFRAME from a malware-hosting server; the IFRAME redirects the browser to a different page, also hosted on the hacker's server.

Next, a multiple-strike attack kit is downloaded to the visitor's PC. The kit tries eight different exploits, and if it finds one that works, hijacks the system.

These kinds of attacks, said Sherstobitoff, essentially make the idea of a "trusted site" moot. "You used to know that if you walked down the dark streets of the Web, you would be infected. Today, you really can't tell what the dark streets are."

The hacker strategy, of course, is to leverage that uncertainty. "This is getting really bad," Sherstobitoff said.

It's so bad, in fact, that while security companies urged Web site administrators to check their server logs for evidence of a compromise, and told corporate security staffs to block several malware-hosting sites at their companies' perimeters, they didn't have much useful advice for end-users.

"Users should be extremely wary when visiting sites, even those typically trusted," was about all Symantec could come up with in an alert to customers of its DeepSight threat notification service.

Disabling JavaScript can also protect against such attacks, Symantec added. Users, however, are often reluctant to switch off JavaScript because without it, many sites are crippled or won't display properly."

Huge Web hack attack infects 500,000 pages - Network World

Mike Brewer

I spent the day at a closed-door, invite only session at Georgetown University with Henry Kissinger, Michael Hayden, Burton Gerber, William Hood, David Robarge, Brent Scowcroft, Jennifer Sims, and Bud Wheelon discussing this very topic (among many others). It's a big problem, and one that Hayden has some unique insights on. It was actually an incredible symposium and I was not only fortunate enough to spend some time and meet these people face to face, talk with them, and ask them some of the things that have been on my mind for a long time, but I was also incredibly, incredibly lucky in that I received a copy of over 4100 pages of recently declassified documents that were given jointly by the CIA and by Cynthia Helms (widow of former CIA Director Richard Helms) to the Georgetown University School of Foreign Policy Library.

TTE, a lot of the documents are letters from Richard Helms written while he was ambassador to Tehran. It's kind of interesting to see that history in incensored, firsthand terms. I'll check and see if it's okay to copy the disc, and if it is, I'll mail you a copy. Send me your snail mail address via PM and I'll drop a copy in the mail - assuming it doesn't violate any Georgetown U rules. I can't see why it would. The stuff is declassified, redacted, and now in the public domain at their Library. I just want to make sure it's okay to send a copy.